Nyro, Laura (18 Oct. 1947-8 Apr. 1997), popular singer-songwriter from the late 1960s onward, was born Laura Nigro in the Bronx, New York, the daughter of Louis Nigro, a piano tuner and jazz trumpeter, and Gilda Mirsky Nigro, a bookkeeper. A largely self-taught pianist and an avid reader of poetry who grew up listening to Leontyne Price, Billie Holiday, Debussy, and Ravel with her mother, Laura began composing songs at age eight. She credited the Sunday school at the New York Society for Ethical Culture with providing the basis of her education; she also attended Manhattan's High School of Music and Art. Among Laura's favorite musicians were John Coltrane, Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, and performers of the so-called girl group genre of early 1960s rock music, such as Martha and the Vandellas and the Shirelles. While in high school, Laura sang with a group of friends in New York City subway stations and on street corners. She and her family spent summers in the Catskill Mountains, where her father played the trumpet at resorts.

The record company executive Artie Mogull became Laura's first manager in 1966. Her father, who tuned Mogull's piano, had convinced him to give his daughter an audition. That year Laura sold her first song, "And When I Die," to Peter, Paul, and Mary for $5,000 and recorded her debut album, More Than a New Discovery, for Verve Folkways. As a teenager she had experimented with different names, and Nyro (pronounced "Nero") was the one she was using at this time. The following year she appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival.

Curiously, nearly all of the many written accounts of Nyro's Monterey appearance describe her performance as a fiasco that culminated in her being booed off the stage. However, this appears not to have been the case. In 1997, D. A. Pennebaker, maker of Monterey Pop (1969), the original, highly acclaimed documentary film of the festival, released Monterey Pop: The Lost Performances. In it, Lou Adler, one of the organizers of the Monterey Pop festival, says that he and Pennebaker called Nyro after viewing the original Monterey footage preparatory to making the later film and told her that "the only thing close to a boo that we can hear is somebody yelling 'Beautiful.'" They invited her to Pennebaker's New York studio to see the footage for herself, but she died soon after receiving the invitation. Even the New York Times, in Stephen Holden's 10 April 1997 obituary of Nyro, perpetuates the booed-off-the-stage myth, although it corrects the record in an article by Deborah Sontag published on 26 October 1997.

Soon after her appearance in 1967 at Monterey, David Geffen heard Nyro and approached Mogull, who had negotiated her recording contract with Verve and owned her music publishing rights, about taking over as her agent. Nyro successfully sued to void her management contract with Mogull and her recording contract with Verve on the grounds that she had entered into them while a minor. Mogull, however, retained ownership rights to the songs she had written thus far. Geffen became Nyro's manager, and the two established a new music publishing company, Tuna Fish Music, under which the proceeds from her future compositions would be divided equally between them. Geffen also arranged a new recording contract for Nyro with Clive Davis at Columbia Records and purchased the publishing rights to Nyro's early compositions from Mogull for $470,000. The second contract he negotiated for Nyro with Columbia, in which they sold all her music publishing rights to the record company, made both Geffen and Nyro millionaires and marked an early milestone in his rise to the top of the popular music business.

In 1968 Columbia Records released Nyro's second album, Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, which is widely considered to be one of her best works. It was followed in 1969 by New York Tendaberry, another highly acclaimed work. Nyro invited jazz great Miles Davis to the studio while she was recording New York Tendaberry and asked him to contribute to an instrumental section, but once he heard what had already been recorded he is reported to have replied, "I can't play on this. You already did it."

After her 1970 album, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, Nyro released Gonna Take a Miracle, her only album of all nonoriginal material, in 1971. Recorded with the group Labelle, Gonna Take a Miracle features Nyro's interpretations of classic rhythm-and-blues songs previously performed by groups like Martha and the Vandellas. In 1973 Columbia re-released her first album, More Than a New Discovery, as The First Songs (Verve had also re-released it, as Laura Nyro, in 1969). In October 1971, however, Nyro had married David Bianchini, a carpenter, and embarked on the first of the several sabbaticals from recording and touring that would punctuate her career. By the time she returned, with the release of Smile, in 1976, the marriage was over. The following year a live album, Season of Lights, appeared. After the 1978 album Nested--recorded when she was pregnant with her only child, a son she named Gil Bianchini--she again took a break from recording, this time until 1984's Mother's Spiritual. (Although she gave her son the surname of her former husband, David Bianchini was not, in fact, Gil's biological father.) She began touring with a band in 1988, her first concert appearances in ten years. These led to her 1989 release, Laura Live at the Bottom Line, which included six new compositions. Her final album of predominantly original material was Walk the Dog and Light the Light (1993), the first and last tracks of which are covers of several rhythm-and-blues songs she loved greatly, Phil Spector and Hank Hunter's "Oh Yeah, Maybe Baby" and a medley consisting of Curtis Mayfield's "I'm So Proud" and Lowman Pauling and Ralph Bass's "Dedicated to the One I Love." The 1997 release Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro is a 34-song compilation spanning her entire career. The new material and additional covers she recorded in her last years have not been released.

Laura Nyro had one sibling, a younger brother, Jan Nigro, who played acoustic guitar on Mother's Spiritual. Maria Desiderio, a Brooklyn-born painter whom Nyro met in 1977, was her companion until Nyro's death on 8 April 1997 at their home in Danbury, Connecticut. Like her mother, Nyro died of ovarian cancer at age forty-nine.

Nyro's own renditions of her songs never attained hit status, but between 1968 and 1970 a number of other singers had achieved significant successes on the charts with her works: the Fifth Dimension with "Wedding Bell Blues," Blood, Sweat, and Tears with "And When I Die," Three Dog Night with "Eli's Coming," and Barbra Streisand with "Stoney End."

Nyro's evocative vocal style mixed jazz and rhythm-and-blues with street pop, gospel, and Broadway, and her three-octave range has led her voice to be characterized as both "a blues soprano" and "a rich, charcoal-smudged alto." Her lyrics range from the breezy "Blowin' Away" to the tragic "Poverty Train" and "Buy and Sell" and the confessional "Lonely Women"; a number of her songs address social issues, including the antiwar "Save the Country," the feminist "Women of the One World," and the environmentalist "Lite a Flame (The animal rights song)." One of her most important songs of social protest was "Broken Rainbow," the title song for a documentary about the relocation of the Navajo that won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1985.

It would be difficult to overstate the extent of Nyro's influence on popular musicians from the 1960s to the present day, including Rickie Lee Jones, Jane Siberry, Phoebe Snow, and Suzanne Vega. Even the legendary Joni Mitchell, who has repeatedly expressed her distaste for being "lumped in with the women" and generally disdains acknowledging influences, conceded Nyro's impact on her in an interview published in the December 1994 issue of the British magazine Mojo. A tribute album, Time and Love: The Music of Laura Nyro, on which Nyro's compositions are performed by fourteen women singers and groups, appeared after her death.

A full-length biography of Laura Nyro, written by Michele Kort, is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press. Articles about her life and music include Maggie Paley, "The Funky Madonna of New York Soul," Life, 10 Jan. 1970; John Rockwell, "From City Girl to Natural Woman," Rolling Stone, 8 Apr. 1976; and Deborah Sontag, "An Enigma Wrapped in Songs," New York Times, 27 Oct. 1997. Fred Goodman, The Mansion on the Hill (1997), and Stephen Singular, The Rise and Rise of David Geffen (1997), contain brief discussions of her relationships with Mogull and Geffen.

• The Authorized Laura Nyro Home Page
  http://www.lauranyro.com
  Based on the singer's own plans for a website. Includes lyrics, photographs, and interviews.
• LauraNyro.net: A fan-supported website
  http://www.lauranyro.net
  Includes elaborate graphics, audio and video selections, and gateways to fan forums.